An Ethical and/or Moral Conundrum

I apparently either read or was aware of John B. Calhoun's mice and rat experiments in the 1960's and '70's and have used the phrase "too many mice (or rats) in a cage" frequently as a comment on the ever increasing problems due to population growth. I had assumed that the problems of Calhoun's mice, their extreme population growth followed by their ultimate total demise, were due to overcrowding, as apparently most people had. There is little doubt that overcrowding played a part in their abrupt change in behavior, but ultimately other factors may have contributed to the final result. A recent VDARE.com post by Lance Welton was an eye-opening re-appraisal of the reasons for the disasters, and their application to human populations.

As was discussed in the post, the affluence of the West made possible by the Industrial Revolution and the attendant decrease in mortality resulting from better nutrition, better medical care and an overall rise in the standard of living has virtually erased natural selection from the first world human population. Now most people think of natural selection as improving a species, or allowing a species to cope with changes in their environment, but there is also a very necessary weeding out of negative attributes. In addition to the occasional mutant resulting from environmental accidents, sexual reproduction intentionally tries many variations of genetic characteristics. In the natural state, defective combinations usually fail to reproduce. But in the modern human Welfare societies, we go to extreme efforts to salvage every fertilized human egg. Thus defectives have a high likelihood of not only surviving, but reproducing. As Welton noted, these defective genes are then able to spread throughout the gene pool, thus debasing it. This does not bode well for Western societies.

There have always been some doubts as to whether 'helping' people is always desirable. The old truth that giving a man a fish feeds him for a day but teaching him how to fish feeds him for a lifetime emphasizes the relative importance of education over welfare. In addition, however, giving him a fish may feed him for the day, but it also encourages him to resort to looking for another handout the next day rather than trying to feed himself. This shows that charity can produce cultural distortions that, if allowed to fester and reproduce, are as detrimental to societal health as genetic defects. One must conclude that charity or welfare for all but the most disabled is not a good idea, and even sparing those that cannot survive without help still poses a question of whether they should be allowed to reproduce.

To paraphrase an old wheeze, it's not nice to try to frustrate Mother Nature. Our culture frowns on the subject of eugenics, where the term is referring to attempts to intentionally improve the gene pool (although animal breeders have been using it for ages). But in effect we have, for the last couple of centuries, been practicing what might be called inverse eugenics, where, by frustrating natural selection, we are unintentionally debasing the human gene pool. What seems to be a noble principle of taking care of the less fortunate members of our society has a dark side. This creates what seems to be a moral or ethical dilemma. We must take steps to counter the reproduction of defective genes, or humans will suffer the same fate as Calhoun's mice, at least in the Western welfare states,. As Welton observes, this seems to be further along than we would like to think.

The moral dilemma is that any attempts to purge defective genes flies in the face of religious and cultural taboos. Even current research trying to edit genes before they can be passed to future generations is under attack, and sterilization or worse is virtually unthinkable, especially if it can be labeled genocide. Yet ignoring the problem may well not be an option. Although termination of carriers of defective genes would be a repugnant and unnecessary extreme, rethinking Western Civilization's religious and cultural proscriptions against abortion, testing of fetuses for genetic abnormalities, and sterilizing obvious mutants might be necessary.

There are some things that can be done to stop making the situation worse. A first mandatory step in the U.S. would be to stop importing defective genes from third world populations. Whether any immigration is necessary or desirable, a minimum response to the problem must be to set the bar for admission very high for genetic traits such as intelligence and industriousness, and against negatives such as criminality and genetic diseases. In their native environments a significant number of third worlders would perish from natural selection, but not only do we keep them alive if they get here, but pay them to breed. This is insane.

The second step of a sane response to the problem is to stop paying welfarites to breed. Although not every welfarite has defective genes that cause diseases, the likelihood that they have undesirable genetic characteristics is sufficiently high that encouraging the propagation of their genes is a poor policy. Trying to test for bad vs. good genes in the welfare community smacks of eugenics, and therefore it would be best to just not provide public reward or even support for welfare breeding.

Forced sterilization is a solution of last resort, although it might be worth seriously considering in the case of those convicted of violent criminal behavior. Short of refinement and acceptance of genetic engineering to eliminate less blatant cases of defective genes, voluntary contraception or sterilization would be commendable, but as a compassionate society one hopes that such drastic measures could ultimately be unnecessary with technology. Currently abortion or sterilization of Downs Syndrome children is tolerated or even encouraged, but ultimately gene editing or other high tech solutions may be able to identify and remove such defective genes from the gene pool.

The problem of affluence frustrating natural selection is sufficiently subtle that its magnitude has only recently come to light. As was pointed out in Welton's post, we are already seeing increases in genetic diseases such as autism, and a decrease in intelligence. Western civilization is already mired in a morass of problems, although many may be related to this one. In any case, as Welton said, we're headed for a disaster, and time to reflect may not be on our side. Some form of eugenics to offset the inverse eugenics of Western civilization's incredible survival successes is necessary.

On Abortion

Although several other concerns related to the country's disastrous financial situation and government's overreach should be the major considerations in the upcoming election, the pro-choice vs the pro-life debate weighs heavily on a large percentage of the population. This blogger believes that government has no business promoting or especially financing abortion. But the question still remains as to what degree if any government should restrict it.


Playing the Devil's Advocate with tongue in cheek, I once suggested that the Law should exempt what I called 'Murder of First Blood'. The idea was that if parents wanted to terminate their children, the state would stay out of the problem. The thinking went along the lines that if parents were deranged enough to kill their offspring, then the world would be better off to rid the gene pool of their genes. Although the premise is flawed for a number of reasons, it serves to shed some light on the subject of abortion.


Arguments for 'pro-choice' are primarily concerned with women's rights to control their own bodies, not only for their health concerns but as a measure of their freedom. With the exception of some religious fundamentalists, most people are agreeable to abortions when the woman's health is at risk, and also when a pregnancy results from rape.


On the 'pro-life' side, the argument is pretty much centered on the question of whether or not the fetus is to be accorded the full rights of a human. The religious couch their position in the dogma that a soul is created at conception, but to enact law based on this belief violates at least the spirit of our Constitution. On the other hand, however, biologically a fertilized egg (human of course, not chicken etc.) has a full chromosome complement of the species, and therefore is, strictly speaking, a human. Not being a lawyer I am not certain, but I suspect that this does not in and of itself confer any specific legal rights or protections, but it does underscore the problem of defining when such rights and protections begin.


If we adopt the 'Murder of First Blood' idea outlined above, the problem goes away in part, but not completely. Currently, the doctor performing the abortion is 'killer', even though the mother (and presumably the father) has given permission. But even my off-the-wall 'First Blood' suggestion does NOT exempt anyone other than the parents. In this case, any abortion with the intent of destroying the fetus by the doctor is presumably a homicide on his part. The procedure of 'partial birth abortion' is the most blatant case of this. The doctor is killing a human, no matter what spin you try to put on it. However, the 'First Blood' principle would allow the doctor to deliver the baby, and THEN present it to the mother. If she can then kill the infant she holds, it's her business. In fact, 'First Blood' would allow her to delay the decision to the day the little terror breaks up her prized china, but I digress.


In all seriousness, however, I hold that a reasonable compromise position may be suggested by the above. It should never be the intent of the medical profession to kill a human, whether it is called abortion or euthanasia. In the abortion case, if a woman desires that her pregnancy be terminated, she should be able to have the procedure performed by competent medical personnel. However, the medical community should be legally charged with making every reasonable attempt to preserve the fetus, not destroy it. Since viability of a premature fetus before the third trimester is unlikely, most (but not necessarily all) earlier abortions would result in the demise of the fetus in spite of reasonable attempts to save it. On the other hand, late term abortions would have the same chance of surviving as similar preemies. The advantage of this approach is that there is no artificial cutoff time or event. The fetus would survive or die on its own.


This suggestion probably will not suit either extreme of the political spectrum, but it does accomplish two things. It recognizes the right of the woman (with the approval of her husband, if married), to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and it recognizes the rights of the unborn as humans, but not as parasites. It further gets the medical profession out of the business of murder.
marcus.everett@citlink.net